292 Lynn Clark and Graeme Trousdale
In section 2, we begin by outlining some issues in linguistic cognition
that are also reported to be operative in human social cognition. To a cer-
tain extent this is to be expected from general principles of Cognitive Lin-
guistics (on which see Croft 2009); but the objective here is to draw on
social psychological research to support our claim that categorization is
operative in all types of cognition (specifically, both social and linguistic
knowledge). This leads us to consider some other critical issues in Cogni-
tive Linguistics, namely multiple inheritance, schematicity and full and
partial sanction. Such concepts allow a fuller understanding of the nature
of the sociolinguistic variation we have observed.
Section 3 consists of a brief description of the corpus and methods of
collection, and a summary of the linguistic change in progress. This
change, known as TH-Fronting, is well-documented in accent studies of
British English (cf. Wells 1982, and the contributions to Foulkes and Do-
cherty 1999b), but its spread into central Scots seems to be more complex
than the changes affecting London English, for instance (on the latter, see
further Tollfree 1999). This section provides a brief overview of the ma-
terial collected and then a multivariate analysis of the data. This section
also provides the data for the ‘cognitive sociolinguistic’ interpretation in
the remainder of the chapter.
Section 4 is concerned with the implications for a usage-based model of
linguistic and social cognition, situated particularly within the parameters
of Cognitive Grammar, though clearly applicable to other models which
form part of the cognitive linguistics enterprise. We argue that high fre-
quency of use may explain some of the variability in TH-Fronting, but that
frequency effects are only explicable when assumptions of a usage-based
model are invoked.
Section 5 is the conclusion, where an approach to sociolinguistics that is
sensitive both to aspects of formal linguistic theory and to the nature of
social meaning is advocated.
- On the relationship between sociolinguistics and cognitive
linguistics
An attempt to bring together (cognitive) linguistic theory with sociolinguis-
tics necessitates a discussion of two related questions: first, how usage-
based is cognitive linguistics; and second, how theoretical is sociolinguis-
tics? The first question is relevant because while it is clear that sociolin-